A lot of Shinkai movies seem to float around the subject of being in love and specifically first love: this is one of them and one of the purest; with no fantasy elements involved or nonlinear time. But that doesn't make it one of the bests. Even when the animation is complex and gorgeous and for a long time is very minimalistic, at the end, it kind of ruins all the feeling with a big sentimental explosion, shot like an over-the-top soap-opera and accompanied by the classical cloying J-Pop song, that makes everything much more cliched.
Review of The Garden of Words
